Your story “Lost Child” is a story within a story: a middle-aged woman is telling a friend about an incident in her childhood, which is narrated, for us, more or less in the voice of the child she was. Why did you choose to frame the story in that way? What does it add for us to see the narrative through the eyes of both the child, Kit, and the adult, Katherine?

I am intrigued by stories that are so deeply imprinted in the memory and carry such an emotional charge that they have to be framed as stories “told to” someone else—as if the original event were too raw to confront head on in a conventional narrative. Classic stories in this tradition are Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw,” Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” and Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” which is even farther removed, as an epistolary novel.

You mentioned to me that the story drew on something that happened in your own childhood which was less dramatic but has always stayed with you. Can you describe that and why it was so memorable?

Yes, this incident is so embedded in my memory that I dream about it—being lost or abandoned in a public place, through some sort of accident. When I was about five years old, with my mother, I inadvertently got into an elevator that I’d thought she was entering, too, but the circumstances were crowded and confused—my mother hadn’t seen where I had gone—and somehow I wound up on a high floor of a busy department store. Eventually, after much trauma and childish tears, we were reunited. But being abandoned and afraid, especially in a foreign city, remains one of my recurring dreams.

Did you have the story mapped out before you started writing? Did you know what Kit’s father was going to do that day? Do you think that the father knew what he was going to do?

Yes, I imagine my stories in my head, often while running or walking, before I begin writing. The process is very visual, cinematic, for me. I see an actual scene. Transposing this scene into language is the exciting challenge, since the scene has no narrative context in my envisioning of it.

In this case, there are two stories, one embedded in the other. So, there are two time sequences—one fifty years ago, the other happening right now.

Kit is a very young child, but at the same time a very perceptive one. She understands instinctively what will please or displease her father. She knows when his anger is directed at her and when it isn’t. How has she developed this heightened sensitivity so young?

As the child of a certain kind of father and—we presume—a more sensitive mother, who has learned how to traverse the minefield of a difficult relationship, Kit would naturally be watchful, wary. I think that most children are highly sensitive to their parents’ moods.

Katherine seems to have done well in life, to have had a successful career as a curator of art, to have married, and to have found a community. How do you think that frightened little girl, who suffered the trauma of losing both parents in one day—never fully knowing how or why—survived and succeeded in living a so-called normal life?

Actually, I think we’d find that many of our friends and acquaintances, should we ever be allowed to share their deepest memories, probably had similarly upsetting episodes in childhood. Not necessarily, of course, as distressing as what happens to Kit but other events in which they felt helpless or witnessed their parents being helpless.

The person of my acquaintance who has endured the most horrific shocks in her life presents a smiling, unwavering cheeriness in public and even with most friends in private. She never—ever—complains or, indeed, even frowns, looks sad. We all present a persona to the world that allows us to navigate it. I think of those people as “the walking wounded”—they are likely to be overachievers, high-energy, uncomplaining, and in control. Like Katherine.

There is a third voice in the story—that of the friend to whom Katherine is recounting her sad past. This woman—the only first-person voice—is a casual friend, not a close confidante; she is also not someone who feels or expresses a lot of emotion. Why do you think Katherine chose her for these revelations?

One of the discoveries of late middle age and beyond is that people we’ve known socially may sometimes reveal facets of themselves that we hadn’t suspected. As soon as a woman becomes a widow, for instance, she will discover the company of other widows, or widowers—a realignment of social priorities. Someone you did not know well may suddenly emerge and build a new connection. Of course, this could be a new romance, too, but the forging of new emotional attachments and intimacies in friendship is probably less noticed, or explored, even as it is more frequent and, to my mind, more interesting than conventional romance.

You said, when we discussed “The Frenzy,” your last story in The New Yorker, “I am most powerfully drawn to places, settings. I want to see, hear, smell, ‘feel’ the atmosphere of a place.” Did this story begin with the hospital and its elevator?

Yes, this story began in the elevator and just outside the elevator, with a child’s limited vision among a confusing crowd of adult legs. In a sense, as in a circle of Hell, the poor child is still there, waiting even now. ♦